Eric Qualman, author of Socialnomics, produced an excellent chorological timeline of the adoption of new media channels. He notes that it took TV a couple of decades to reach something like 50M viewers, Facebook a couple of years to reach 700M, but only nine months for the apps marketplace to reach 1B downloads. As the fastest-adopted channel, mobile has to be on a marketer’s radar. The mobile app marketplace is still in its infancy, but from a marketer’s standpoint there are two early formats that are working best – gaming and commerce.

from a marketer’s standpoint there are two early formats that are working best – gaming and commerce

The casual gaming market is explosive. Not just for addictive puzzle games like Angry Birds, but also for advertising sponsored games. The approach here is to provide an engaging, addictive experience that captures the audience’s attention while reserving real estate for advertising. This is the most common advertising usage of the apps, but you will also see “placement” as you do with commercial products in movies. If you’re interested in this topic, I talk a lot more about mobile apps, mobile scanning and the mobile web in the Experian Marketing Innovation Report 2012.